Mexico Says Major Drug Suspect Escaped as U.S. Weighed Status

By SAM DILLON

Published: March 2, 1997

MEXICO CITY, March 1—
A man accused of being the top money launderer for one of Mexico's major drug trafficking cartels escaped ''inexplicably'' from police custody this week, Mexican officials said Friday night, but the authorities failed to disclose the incident until hours after President Clinton certified Mexico as a full ally in the war on drugs.

Humberto Garcia Abrego, the brother of Juan Garcia Abrego, a convicted cocaine trafficker imprisoned in the United States, slipped away from police officers assigned to guard him during questioning at Government offices in downtown Mexico City early Wednesday, the Mexican Attorney General's office said.

But the office withheld announcement of Mr. Garcia Abrego's escape until Friday at about 11 P.M., several hours after Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright announced the Clinton Administration's full certification of Mexico's anti-drug efforts.

''Inexplicably, the official in charge of the investigation informed his superiors that Humberto Garcia Abrego had gone from the National Institute for Combatting Drugs,'' before the questioning was completed, the Attorney General's office said in a confused statement sent to news organizations to announce Mr. Garcia Abrego's escape.

The incident is the second during the intense two-week lobbying campaign that preceded Friday's certification decision in which Mexican officials withheld disclosure of an embarrassing development, even as Clinton Administration officials were lauding them for their sincerity and whole-hearted cooperation. Today, the White House had no immediate comment on the escape or the timing of the Mexican announcement.

After the arrest on Feb. 6 of Mexico's top anti-narcotics official, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, on charges of collaborating with the country's top trafficker, Mexican officials kept his detention secret for 12 days. They announced it only after newspapers reported that anti-narcotics troops had searched several of the general's homes.

Humberto Garcia Abrego, the younger brother of the trafficker who controlled the narcotics organization that dominated northeastern Mexico and southern Texas, known as the Gulf Cartel, was arrested in July, accused of overseeing the cartel's billion-dollar money laundering operations.

He spent six months in a federal prison here, a spell interrupted briefly in September when his lawyers persuaded a rural judge to order his release. That order was immediately overturned when prosecutors obtained his rearrest, and Mr. Garcia Abrego was never actually freed.

A similar scenario played itself out starting late Tuesday, when another rural judge from the northeastern state of Tamaulipas again ordered Mr. Garcia Abrego's release from Mexico's Northern Penitentiary on the basis of a constitutional appeal, according to the Attorney General's statement.

Mexican anti-drug officers immediately rearrested him, but a judicial order required them to come up with new criminal charges within 48 hours or release him, the statement said. He was taken to the offices of the National Institute for Combatting Drugs for questioning. At some undisclosed time later, Mr. Garcia Abrego escaped from the site.

The two drug agents who were questioning him have been put under house arrest, the Government's statement said.

One of the two agents, Jose Felix Name, is an army colonel, the Guadalajara newspaper Siglo 21 reported today.

The agents ''disobeyed clear orders from their superiors'' to interrogate Mr. Garcia Abrego and to prepare new criminal charges against him, the statement said. It pledged to ''investigate and sanction any improper conduct by public servants with all the rigor of the law.''

After Mr. Garcia Abrego's escape, Mexico's Federal Judicial Police issued a nationwide alert for its officers to be on the alert for him. ''Be on the watch for the Mercedes Benz in which it is known that Humberto Garcia Abrego travels, in order to detain him,'' said the alert issued Wednesday, which was cited by the Siglo 21 newspaper.

The National Institute for Combatting Drugs was set up with United States assistance 1993 and was modeled on the Drug Enforcement Administration, a United States agency. General Gutierrez Rebollo was the institute's director during the two months before his arrest.

American officials hoped that the institute's agents would prove less corrupt than those of the other anti-drug forces. But since General Gutierrez Rebollo's detention, American officials have acknowledged that the institute has been thoroughly compromised by traffickers, who by one United States estimate spend $6 billion annually here to bribe public officials.

Mr. Garcia Abrego has never been accused of active participation in drug smuggling, but is accused of overseeing his brother's efforts to channel drug profits into real estate and legitimate businesses, according to Mexican prosecutors and an F.B.I. report on the Gulf Cartel.

''Humberto has no direct connections to the Juan Garcia Abrego drug operations, but is fully aware of all the aspects of them, including the landings of drug-laden airplanes,'' the report says. ''Humberto kept this separation so that if Juan Garcia Abrego ever got arrested, Humberto would be in charge of the businesses and they wouldn't be lost.''

Mr. Garcia Abrego's escape appears to have come at about the same time that Mexican officials said they arrested another reputed top operator of the Gulf Cartel, Oscar Malherbe, on Wednesday at a Mexico City shopping center.

Law enforcement officials in Mexico and the United States had been seeking Mr. Malherbe since his indictment in both countries in 1990.

Mexican officials did not delay their announcement of Mr. Malherbe's arrest. Instead, the news was immediately relayed to Washington, where Clinton Administration officials referred to it Friday in praising Mexico during the final hours of lobbying before the certification announcement.

''If this is a trend, its a good trend,'' Nicholas Burns, the State Department spokesman, said of Mr. Malherbe's arrest.

An American drug official said the timing raised questions about how diligently Mexican authorities had been seeking Mr. Malherbe.

''We've been looking for Malherbe for five or six years,'' the official said. ''And then just before the day of the certification announcement, bingo! So you have to ask, did they know where he was, and just wait to arrest him until it was politically expedient?''

After the announcement of certification on Friday, Mexico was said to have made several commitments sought by American law enforcement agencies.

In Washington today, a State Department press officer, Stephanie Eicher, said that neither Mexico nor the United States had signed any formal agreements on certification.

She said that the Administration had set some ''benchmarks'' in areas where Mexico needed to improve its performance on matters of illegal drugs, and that these should not be viewed as concessions by the Mexican Government.